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Robot Attorneys and the Google Ad Monolith
85 Plays2 years ago
- https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-lawyer-isnt-a-lawyer-and-im-not-sure-its-even-a-robot/
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/the-doj-sues-google-for-ad-dominance-wants-to-break-company-up/
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzzfeed-to-use-chatgpt-creator-openai-to-help-create-some-of-its-content-11674752660
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Stories
00:00:00
Speaker
All right. We're recording now. Good evening. How you guys doing tonight? Oh, I'm so good. I had to do a little bit of extra discipline at bedtime with the two, almost three year old. So, you know, my heart is, is just sad. It's broken. I'm a broken man from disciplining a two year old.
00:00:25
Speaker
They don't tell you before you have a kid, like how much of a production bedtime is going to be. Like they really don't see comics and like shows where it's like, Oh, you read them a book and then they go to bed. And it's like, Oh no, that's like step nine out of, out of nine. That's the last step.
00:00:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's a whole, we've had almost the exact same bedtime ritual for four years now. It's crazy. It's done the same songs and done the, except adding like adding potty, adding teeth brushing, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah. And they don't tell you before you have a kid, they don't tell you how important the ritual is and how important it is to keep the ritual the same as much as possible because holy smokes are little kids creatures of habit. Yeah, they love it.
00:01:13
Speaker
like lawyers, creatures of habit, still making the right starting pleadings the same way for 100 years. You can't cost me a music. I'm still here. All right.
Esquiring Minds Podcast and Lawyer Friendships
00:01:34
Speaker
So hello and welcome to a squaring minds episode five for January 26th, 2023. I think that's right. Right.
00:01:42
Speaker
This show is just, uh, three lawyer friends goofing around for your enjoyment. Nothing we say should be taken as legal advice. I'm going to get my introduction out of the way right away because I never get to it. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey and I'm joined as always by Jake. Yeah, I'll go first. I am first on the list. So I should have known that. Uh, I'm Jake Schumer. Uh, I'm a land use and local government focusing attorney.
00:02:12
Speaker
And I'm Jason Ramsland. I sue people's bad bosses. So I'm a plaintiff's employment lawyer. Uh, I am practicing mainly in Indiana with a touch of Georgia and like a tiny little dash in Florida with my good buddy, Jake. Yeah. And so that's us. That's us. The Esquiring minds. That's a matter of public record. We are, we are friends and it is provable by looking at public records. So.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yes. Everybody I've ever appeared in a case with is, has been a friend. I've never appeared on the same side as an enemy. Yeah. That's not true. I mean, look, I think I, I think I might have. Um, but, but serving as local counsel for an out of state attorney. Now that's, that's true friendship right there. That's true mercenary. Yeah. That's taking you to the airport. That is the high, that's helping you move. That is the highest level of friendship for lawyers. Yeah. The court,
00:03:08
Speaker
the airport of court appearances. Florida Supreme Court actually had a decision like two years ago where they had to define friendship because there's a question about whether or not if your friend's on Facebook with a judge, that judge has to refuse themselves automatically because you have to refuse automatically if you're a friend.
00:03:32
Speaker
And they were basically like, they actually tried to define friendship. It was great. And they ultimately decided it's a factual question, case by case, which I feel like is kicking the can down the road. They should have had some real courage and told us what a friend is once and for all. So that it could have gone to the Supreme Court.
00:03:56
Speaker
This sounds an awful lot like, is a burrito a sandwich? Like, where's the, like, are we going to split hairs and draw? Okay. This is acquaintance and this is, uh, you know, a fond acquaintance and then somewhere along the line, you verge into friendship. And yeah, I think like friendship is I'm ashamed of the Supreme court. Oh, there you go. Yes. Just like, uh, yeah, just like adult entertainment, just like pornography. I know a friend. There you go.
00:04:26
Speaker
That's right. That's the official law of Florida. I know a friend when I see one. Isn't that on the license plate just above the orange? That's really not a bad saying for a state. It feels like it should be for Vermont or something like that instead of Florida though. You know a friend when you see one, Vermont. Florida is more like shoot on site. Watch your feet for Gators. I don't know.
Transparency in Government and DoNotPay App
00:04:54
Speaker
prosecuting local documents 2019. Right. Speaking of using the news. Have you guys checked your garages for any like confidential documents or anything like that? Are you like a hundred percent certain that you don't have anything out there? You know, one thing I like about working for governments is that almost everything is a public record. I like it and I hate it. I like it because
00:05:22
Speaker
confidentiality. I don't have to worry a lot about confidentiality and keeping records confidential because, hey, everything is a public record unless it's not. And we know when it's not. So I love that I don't have to think about that very hard.
00:05:39
Speaker
I'm actually going through getting ready to move my office and move out of my current office in Athens. I've been going through and doing the pre-move purge and all sorts of confidential information that's being either shipped back to a client because the case is over and I don't need it anymore or boxed up and put into a tote somewhere for when I actually do need it.
00:06:01
Speaker
The reality of luring in 2023 is that if it's on paper, you probably don't need it because you sure as heck better have that in a digital file somewhere if it's ever actually going to be useful. I wish we were more paperless, like still still not enough for me that how much paper we're using right now is this so much like weird, you know, as we've dealt with in our case, we still got a mail stuff to judges.
00:06:28
Speaker
We still got to print stuff, we got to mail stuff, we got to mail them hundreds of pages for motions. Like, yeah, we're still doing it, I guess.
00:06:44
Speaker
I would pay $10 a month every month just so that courthouses would print on my PDFs for me. So I don't have to mail them. Anyway, go ahead. No, well, I was going to say, speaking of next generation technology, like PDFs and scanners and things, we have a bunch of smaller topics to talk about tonight, I think was our plan, right? And chief among them is this nonsense of the do not pay a robot lawyer. I know you guys follow this because we've been talking about it. I love this. Oh, yeah. I'll pretend I'm asking you. You guys know what I'm talking about, right?
00:07:13
Speaker
Oh yeah. So do not pay. Yeah, it's this app that's started by Joshua Browder, who I don't know a lot of his personal biography, but I think he's the son of maybe like some venture capital.
00:07:29
Speaker
kind of guy. I mean, I know his father is like a reputable, reputable might be going too far, a well-known person in, I don't know, whatever field he's in. And so like, Joshua doesn't come out of nowhere. He comes from a family of move makers, I guess, and developed this, I think it started out maybe, maybe it started life as an app on phones that do not pay that
00:07:57
Speaker
I think started out, Andrew, you can jump in and correct me as soon as I get all this wrong. I think it started out as ways to get out of late fees or easy ways to appeal traffic tickets or parking tickets or something like that.
00:08:10
Speaker
or talk down Comcast bills. I mean, that's sort of where it first came to my attention. Yeah, that's what I heard. Yeah, you could sign up for it and they would... I mean, I always assumed because it was all in the early iteration anyway, it was all behind the scenes. It wasn't as though there was any sort of live connect to a rep for Comcast and the do not pay robot tries to talk them into giving you a deal. You just would sort of give them your account information and then they would supposedly negotiate the best deal that they could get for you.
00:08:36
Speaker
My assumption was always that they were going to Comcast with a collection of people that wanted to get their bills knocked down and say, what would you give this group of people if they all would sign for another year or something? I never really thought it was actually, I don't know, convincing someone at Comcast to reduce the price. You know what I mean? Like in the way that this do not pay thing was supposed to be. And just Jason, to your point, his father is Bill Browder, who is a political activist. He's the Hermitage Capital Management guy.
00:09:06
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So a venture capital guy. Yeah. That's one of the most annoying things about all of these tech stories and legal tech stories is like every legal tech organization wants to like pat themselves on the back and be all proud and excited and like blasted out on Twitter and mastodon. Hey, we secured this much venture capital funding. Like great. Don't, I don't care. Tell me about your product, fix your product or make it work better. I think it's funny that
00:09:36
Speaker
that Joshua Browder, I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought.
00:09:41
Speaker
Uh, but he, he's really convinced about that stuff. He talks a lot about that and he talks a lot about the consumer, you know, powering to the people and reducing prices for, um, uh, you know, the gap, the wealth gap of justice, how difficult it is to get a lawyer, which I think is all legit. And when it comes to consumer stuff and they, when they went to Comcast, here's what I was thinking about earlier. Um, I thought what they were going to do was, you know, all these Comcast and AT&Ts, they have like set.
00:10:11
Speaker
they have set scripts for their customer services people to follow. I thought they would use AI to basically do a mass thing, figure out what those scripts are, and then just the second you hire them, they go through the script with the AI and get you exactly what they know they can get, which would be, I think, cool. I think that would be cool so that I don't have to sit on hold for three hours to get
00:10:39
Speaker
$150 discount or to cancel something that I should be able to cancel out online
00:10:45
Speaker
But the thing that really got him in trouble, and honestly, if Joshua Browder was not tweeting, I don't think this would be as that bad of a story. But he's tweeting very venture capital-y things of like, he's gonna revolutionize the industry, and then say, we're gonna have a robot lawyer giving advice in court.
00:11:10
Speaker
And it's not technically illegal. And every lawyer in the world is saying, excuse me, I'm sorry. You're giving an unlicensed, you're giving, you're telling somebody in court what to say. Some person that probably doesn't, you know, doesn't know better. I guess they're getting paid a million dollars, which is you know, that maybe that's
00:11:28
Speaker
worth it to risk jail for a parking ticket. I think the million dollars was for the Supreme Court only, wasn't it? Oh, yeah, that's right. Never mind. That was the offer. That's right. He offered somebody a million dollars to do oral argument at Supreme Court, which is hilariously too low. If you're doing oral argument at Supreme Court, you're already probably pulling down, if not seven figures,
00:11:55
Speaker
pretty close unless you're working for the government or something. And then doing that would be career suicide. Maybe you're disbarred because it's clearly not allowed, dishonorable to the court, et cetera, et cetera. Certainly you would have a hard time ever appearing in front of that court again. Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker
My sort of, I mean, this isn't a very interesting angle, but my thought was how difficult would it be just to attempt to do an oral argument, getting instructions through your AirPods from an actual human
AI in Legal Contexts: Challenges and Controversies
00:12:25
Speaker
being? Like forget about the whole technology of this whole idea. Let's just pretend instead it's just another attorney you're talking to and they're going to tell you what you should say.
00:12:32
Speaker
I feel like that would be a horrible experience. And that's just the proportion that is the earpiece connecting to your phone. It doesn't require any other technology but that, attempting to make a cellular phone call or some sort of phone call from inside a building and sort of have real-time responses and not sound like a person with an aphasia or something.
00:12:51
Speaker
especially courtrooms aren't like orderly, aren't as orderly as they seem on TV where, you know, it's like one person talks than another person talks. It is judge talks to you. Maybe you start, maybe the judge interrupts you and now you haven't listened to what the judge was saying because you were listening to what the person in the earpiece was saying. That sounds so stressful to me. I would rather wing it myself.
00:13:18
Speaker
The skills that it's going to take to do something like this aren't the skills that lawyers are trained with. It's like the skills that 24 hour news network anchors are trained with where you can listen to what's got breaking news coming through in my ear piece. And like, it's not the skills that are, you know, that you get in law school. The direct ear to mouth connection that some people have that I do not have where you can pass through, you can pass through information without losing another train of thought.
00:13:46
Speaker
Um, yeah, it seems like a terrible idea. Yeah. And then it seems also to be, I mean, so this wasn't the only thing that sort of do not pay made news for this week. There was a, a, uh, we'll put it in the show notes, but there was a tech dirt article where somebody like went through and tried to use, do not pay to generate all kinds of, um, like a demand letter and, uh, uh, some doc, uh, financial breach of contract, uh, filings. And it seems to just be sort of.
00:14:14
Speaker
a nightmare. But it also seems to not work because this is supposedly an AI. These were documents we're going to generate. And apparently, the quickest they could get even a simple demand letter back to you was an hour, which, you know, depending on how much demand there was, I could fulfill that if I just had people, you know, just had a Google form and you emailed me, I can turn it around in an hour.
00:14:34
Speaker
So I'm wondering to what extent any of this even existed and how much this was just Browder seeing like chat GPT and stable diffusion on all this other like AI being the new catchy thing and saying, Oh yeah, we got a whole ton of it. We're going to have a robot. Like how much of this even ever existed? Yeah. One of those things was eight hours long. I think it was the small claims complaint that it was generating.
00:14:56
Speaker
Uh, yeah. And that's like, I could definitely generate a really simple small claims complaint in eight hours. Um, yeah. And that, that tech dirt article made, it's definitely made it seem like there's somebody filling in like spaces on a form and that this AI is all fake. This company started, I guess in 2015, this is an old, this isn't that new of a company.
00:15:21
Speaker
Um, that's at least that's, I read that somewhere that it started in 2015. So that's what the Wikipedia article says at least. Uh, and it's got like, you know, a hundred plus million dollar value valuation. And we already have.
00:15:39
Speaker
We were talking about this what like in episode one when we were talking about like AI tools, replacing stuff. And the thing is, you can have forms already, you don't need AI to make forms, you don't need an AI to fill in the blank. And we have LegalZoom, which is people have considered lawyers have had some like small, small panics about LegalZoom because it's a, you know, a website where they
00:16:05
Speaker
They provide you basic documents under the supervision of a lawyer. And so this seemed like a legal zoom. And the fact that
00:16:13
Speaker
It said it was AI, but it took eight hours. Made me think that maybe that whole courtroom stuff was actually gonna be a person, it was gonna add a whole other connection to make it even worse, where person speaks into ear pods, there's a lawyer listening on the other side, or it's like text to speech to an AI, and then a lawyer interpreting that and reading it back to the person, or something like that, where there was gonna be another layer of abstraction there.
00:16:43
Speaker
That would have been even worse. It's like sending communication to the Mars Rover. It would be like three minutes between a question and an answer, right? Yeah. It's crazy. Well, I heard, and this might be wrong because we never actually knew where he was planning to do this, but I heard that the way that they were going to get AirPods in was as learning disability, or not learning, hearing disabilities.
00:17:09
Speaker
So that would be the explanation you're on, like, your honor, it's like, I'm, they're deaf and they're trying, they're trying to process it. I guess that would be the explanation, which just kind of shows how this was never really, this was always a publicity stunt. It was never going to be a part of the, the actual business. Cause a venture capital funded firm doing something just for the splashy news headlines. Yeah.
00:17:32
Speaker
Unheard of. Yeah. But so this... Do not pay. Sorry. Do not pay. Do not pay. Started out not as fix your cable bill or like cancel Netflix. That's something else. It started off with parking tickets, contesting parking tickets and had like a really good record because really what it takes to contest a parking ticket is you go and you get a form that they'll hand you at the clerk's office, which sounds like what was happening with that eight hour small claims complaint.
00:18:02
Speaker
that was coming out. It's basically like you know which blanks on the form need to be filled in and then they, in the app, inquire about, okay, what belongs in this blank? What belongs in this blank? Okay, so you're not doing anything for me that I couldn't get from the form that I can go down to the court clerk's office and get and fill in myself by hand. You're just doing it on an app.
00:18:23
Speaker
which great, democratize the whole process, make it accessible, make it available to more people in an easy way that is like literally at people's fingertips instead of having to trudge down to the courthouse to get it. But to slap an AI label on it and pretend like you're really innovating here seems a little bit suspicious.
00:18:46
Speaker
It's really like AI as a label is just so slapped on things that aren't really AI, and it's just so slippery that a lot of things can be described as AI that aren't really that interesting. We've had predictive texts since iPhones came out. We've had predictive texts before then.
00:19:07
Speaker
What? The 10 key or the 12 key, whatever it was. I forget the name of that. When you would hit four, four, four, five, it would try to figure out... No, this is on T9 typing. We're talking about T9 typing on old phones. On T9 typing, yeah. On old phones. It would try to figure out what word you were saying when you hit four numbers, even though technically there might be more words.
00:19:34
Speaker
Um, so that's, you know, anyway, that would be branded as AI if it was 2023 for sure. Yeah. AI is the new blockchain, right? Everything is AI. Just call it AI. What was before blockchain? Was it web 2.0? That's way too old. Uh, what web, uh, something I'm sure came between web 2.0 and the blockchain. Um,
00:19:59
Speaker
I don't know. But yeah, so do not pay basically. So then the tech article comes out where the person tries to walk through and I shouldn't say the person. This person has a name. The author's name is I'm stalling something. Towson. Towson. Yes. So shoot.
00:20:15
Speaker
She walks through the whole process of trying to do basically anything with do not pay and screenshots and all screenshots and all. Yeah. And essentially none of it works or it works in a way that makes it pretty clear it's not AI. And so she I don't know if she did this on Twitter. I saw it on Mastodon, but maybe she did it on Twitter as well. She kind of
00:20:32
Speaker
went through asking Browder for a response. And he gave a couple of sort of ham-handed responses. And then the next morning, which I think was yesterday morning, announced, never mind. I have sad news. We're going to discontinue literally all of the products that she had walked through in the screenshots. And we're going to be pursuing something else. Because we found there wasn't really much use for it. And so my prediction, I have no inside information. And I don't know that this is true. But I just want to predict that this comes out eventually.
00:21:00
Speaker
all of this was just connected to Amazon Mechanical Turk. And he was paying like five cents to people to fill in these forms basically and turn it around. And the more attention it got and the more people tried, the bigger the backlog. And that's why that time just had to keep getting tech, you know, longer and longer. Oh, wow. You think this is going to come out eventually? Like I'm
00:21:23
Speaker
The product of private companies is like, you know, I feel like they're trying, they are so private about this. And we've, we saw like with the Frank, the Frank acquisition that a company where it turned out that like all their users were fake, but they were still able to get JP Morgan to buy them. Uh, because JP Morgan just didn't know, like didn't know at the time. Uh, I feel like we're never going to learn. We're never going to learn anything about do not pay.
00:21:51
Speaker
about what's actually going on here. And when, but it's not just that he canceled it. He was like, uh, state bar offices have called me threatening prosecution. And he's like, he acts shocked about this. Like the lawyers shut me down. And it's like, Oh, have you never heard of unlicensed practice law? Do you know what that is? Did you know that it's like, he was so concerned about whether or not it was against courtroom rules to have a listening device in there and relay.
00:22:20
Speaker
that he didn't realize that giving legal advice when you're not licensed to give legal advice is a problem, and in fact a crime.
Legal Process Innovations and Ethical Considerations
00:22:28
Speaker
So, yeah, it's a jailhouse lawyer. This is calling to mind the Jeffrey Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park, not the one that you're thinking of, but the one where they spent so much time thinking about whether they could, that they didn't stop to think about whether they should.
00:22:45
Speaker
And I think that's what, I mean, to steal a bad business jargon term that's getting tossed around way too much recently, basically got out over his skis a little bit here and like started lurching too far forward into doing a thing before realizing, hey, you know what, maybe this wasn't a great idea. And like contesting parking tickets is a great thing to automate and make super easy.
00:23:12
Speaker
uh, waving, you know, automating a process for, uh, waving student activity fees or something like that at school or signing up for a class action thing like Equifax, the data breach from Equifax. Like those are probably good and suitable things to automate. And you're probably not really crossing any lines that anybody
00:23:33
Speaker
cares about when you're doing that kind of stuff. It's when you branch into, hey, I'm actually going to zero-node de Bergerac for you in the courtroom and like be whispering into your ear all of the sweet nothings that you need to get the judge to decide the case in your favor. Like, okay, that's pretty clearly over the line and that's going to draw a lot of attention from state bar associations and the folks who are empowered to prosecute the unauthorized practice of law.
00:23:59
Speaker
I just want to say for the record, that was the exact quote I was thinking from Jurassic Park. The quote that people always take from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park is the life finds a way quote, but this is the one that's more apt for the situation. What if instead of automating all that,
00:24:18
Speaker
you abolished all low value contracts whatsoever by statute. Just like this talk about how things should be automated at a low level like parking tickets. Just wanted to shout out David Hoffman's article, Defeating the Empire of Forms.
00:24:38
Speaker
Which is basically David Hoffman being a law professor of some kind, I really have no idea. University of Pennsylvania, he's on Mastodon, who basically argued that we should abolish low value contracts because there are too many contracts, too many terms of use for all the websites and all that.
00:24:56
Speaker
Hold on a second. Hold on a second. That's not quite what he said. He didn't say that we should abolish all contracts. He said that contracts below a certain value. I think the threshold was $500 is what he said. I think it's $100. $100. Was it $100? All of those should be oral contracts. And what he's really getting at here isn't that contracts are bad.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker
Every contract has to have a venue selection clause and a choice of law and a merger clause. And you have to, in the realm that I work in, everything's got confidentiality and liquidated damages if we reach confidentiality and non-disparagement and all that stuff. Like, yeah, you know what? He's got a really good point that, you know, contracts have gotten to be out of control with a lot of things to the point where it's inaccessible to people without legal training.
00:26:00
Speaker
I haven't looked at this. Do you think that when we signed up for Twitter and Facebook and everything, do you think we've indemnified them for any damages, for any claims caused by our use of the platform? And therefore, theoretically, if they get sued for something we do, they can sue us for the attorney's fees? I bet we did. I bet we did. If I was in there and I know nobody reads it, I would put it in there. Why not?
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah, we probably signed a binding arbitration agreements to saying that we can't sue them in court. We have to do it in a jams arbitration. Yeah. My wife, uh, my wife did Lula row.
00:26:44
Speaker
which you may, if you all aren't familiar, was a multi-level marketing company that was very popular for like two years or something. And they had a mandatory arbitration clause and venue selection in which you had to go to Wyoming physically in order to contest anything. I learned it because as you might imagine,
00:27:10
Speaker
things got, uh, things devolved and to the point where it was legal. So they made a documentary about it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I remember that. Uh, yeah. Lula rich, I think is the name of it. I didn't actually watch it, but I think my wife did because like many wives in circles that we run in, she was involved in, uh, no, my wife wasn't, but she had friends who were involved in Lula row. And like, that's a pretty similar story that you got across the board.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure that Lula Roe contract, just like the Twitter terms and conditions or basically every click wrap agreement that you sign on the web, and there's probably a thousand of them a year. I think that was Professor Hoffman's point is there's so many of these that you do a thousand of them a year maybe. They've all got these terms that
00:27:58
Speaker
you know people without legal training couldn't understand them and people with legal training like the three of us just ignore them and sign them anyway without ever bothering to read and digest the whole thing because if we did we'd never sign it because it's all a bunch of garbage yeah or do we just yeah it's kind of me signing all those and just clicking agree knowing exactly what's in there it's kind of a product of
00:28:24
Speaker
The fact that everything we do is based on chaos and society hangs by a thread always. And I know that if they actually tried to punish me for this, I know exactly how this happened. They'll never actually sue a single user for the costs associated with defending a lawsuit.
00:28:46
Speaker
they just want to they just want to put themselves in the absolute best position. And none of it really matters because so much of it is never going to get tested, because it takes so much effort to do it. And that's the Professor Hoffman point, right? Is that just sort of how much of contracts is is that is just all of the like, no, neither party thinks that this is going to be enforced or this is ever going to actually come to pass. And it's just you're just
00:29:13
Speaker
You know what I mean? He makes a good point. I like the $100 limit. That seems like anything under $100. I think the point was anything under $100 would only be enforceable if it was an oral contract, right? I think it rendered all under $100 things, an oral contract, whether it was written or not. So it would be enforceable just as an oral contract. I might be wrong about that.
00:29:39
Speaker
That sounds right. So like having a written contract wouldn't make there not be an agreement. It would just be the written version doesn't exist. Gotcha. So the only thing that exists is the kind of bare bones. You're understanding your handshake. Right. Yeah.
00:29:57
Speaker
So part of the thing. He didn't go far enough. 500, 500 is better. Part of the whole thing is that touches on the gross imbalance of power between the very large parties that we're contracting with as individuals all the time and the very minuscule power that we have as the individual is contracting with these monolithic organizations. And cash, we got to pick a different punching bag than Twitter here. What's another punching bag that we could pick?
00:30:27
Speaker
How about Google? Sure. Sure. It looks like in the topic list, we're going to be picking on Google in a second anyway.
00:30:36
Speaker
But like, OK, we signed this agreement with Google. Like, what bargaining power does Jason Ramsland have with Google? Like, zero bargaining power. And so if they're offering a service, I got to take the terms of that. I got to take the service on the terms that they're willing to sell it to me and anybody else in the world. And if you want to modify those terms at all, you sure as heck better be a very big corporation. Like, we're talking Walmart big if you want some other deal with them because they don't have time to negotiate.
00:31:04
Speaker
individual one-on-one things where I can't call up to Google and say, hey, I was going to sign up for this $9.99 a month Google Drive extra storage, but I didn't really like this term and the terms and conditions here. Can we agree to modify that? Can you send me a new copy? No, that's not going to happen. The collapsing of the bargaining power disparity between
00:31:29
Speaker
very large organizations and the very small individuals. That seems like a great idea to me. Also an idea that is never ever going to come to fruition because we live in the United States.
Antitrust Cases and Tech Monopoly Concerns
00:31:40
Speaker
Really, any organization that has enough money to hire an attorney to draft a standard contract is out of balance a little bit. When I'm acting as general counsel for the government and they are asked whether or not they should sign this standard contract from this tech organization,
00:32:04
Speaker
That has all this illegal stuff in it. That's like not legal for a government to sign i'm just like look They they're not going to negotiate this Right sign it. It's it's unenforceable against you. So Okay, it's it sucks to be them. They're kind of they're kind of the ones that are screwed on it Uh, but it's never going to come to pass anyway, like you know, uh
00:32:30
Speaker
Confidentiality provisions, for example, in Florida are a government can't agree to confidentiality because it has public records obligations. So it's just kind of like, okay, you won't remove this confidentiality provision because it's in your uniform terms of service. It's not going to work for you, bud.
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, so speaking of monolithic, massive organizations that you can't go up against, we mentioned we're gonna talk about Google and the Department of Justice going after them, going after their advertising business, because apparently in 2023, now is when that's a problem, which I found, I mean, I find the timing
00:33:08
Speaker
It seems like this should have been about a decade ago. I think Google is in the worst position ever. Not to say it's in a bad position, but to the extent of it being a monopoly, I think there are more competitors. I didn't research this, as always. I'll note again, we don't do any research. We don't do any homework. But I would bet that they are in a month. On purpose. We intentionally do not do any research.
00:33:31
Speaker
I would bet that they are at the lowest market share now as at any point since they acquired DoubleClick in terms of advertising on, you know, there was a time there, there was a stretch there for like a solid decade where they were basically the only major players in town. And so this was, this was really surprising. I didn't see this coming at all. I did a little accidental research, which is I watched Tech Linked, which is a good YouTube channel, which is three times a week tech news.
00:34:00
Speaker
And they mentioned like for 40 seconds they talked about this and apparently so their market share in terms of like Facebook and you know others like that isn't what they're going after. They're going after apparently they have like 85 or 90 percent market share and maybe like are the only player in town in certain tool sets and markets for selling where like they own the market. They own the tools to make the advertisements.
00:34:30
Speaker
And that's what they're going after because it's basically an accidental both horizontal and vertical integration in like multiple areas and all the substrates of advertising. They Facebook has a huge share at the top. But if you go down deeper, Google gets a piece like all the way down. So that's apparently what's going on. I'm not I'm not a antitrust lawyer and I don't know about this, but
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, but somebody apparently they're talking to antitrust lawyers and it seems like it seems likely to succeed, apparently. And speaking of it being should have been 10 years ago, one of the basis of the lawsuit, according to the tech link, was that they'd essentially already destroyed the markets, like by by having such control over it. So yeah, maybe it should have been brought 10 years ago. I don't know.
00:35:28
Speaker
So what's the solution to this? I mean, do we break up Google like we did with AT&T and we create, or was it AT&T? I think it was AT&T. Bell Labs. Bell Labs. And we broke them up into the baby bells. Is that what we do with Google? Because Google's core product at the very start was search. And then the core product that grew out of search as monetizable was advertising.
00:35:57
Speaker
And then obviously they're in a bazillion other fields now where they're making phones and they're a major vendor of web infrastructure services and stuff like that. So do we break them up? How do you break up their ad business into multiple pieces? That part I don't understand.
00:36:19
Speaker
So the way that they might do it, so I'm doing on the fly research right now, and I'd seen this diagram before, but basically the DOJ had like a flowchart
00:36:35
Speaker
that showed how all the Google businesses work together. And there are four businesses that are at issue, which is DoubleClick, Google Ad Exchange, Google Ads, and Display and Video 360, which DoubleClick might be the worst one that they're going after because it has over 90% market share. And that's where bidding is occurring, I guess.
00:37:00
Speaker
Or that's where bids go in from the website. Never mind. I'm not gonna try to describe this flow chart. I think DoubleClick for publishers is I think that's the like actually displaying like say we start a magazine called Esquiring Minds Magazine and we wanted to run Google Ads on it. I think DoubleClick for publishers is the way we sort of put that template up on our page so that we can have ads show up.
00:37:22
Speaker
So they own 90% of that market. So in other words, if you want ads to appear on your page, 90% of the time you're going to be going to double click. Sorry, go ahead, Jake. So this is the equivalent of the marketing firm that, or the, yeah, I guess marketing firm whose job it is to get ads placed in Vanity Fair or something like that. This is the business that's selling the pages in the magazines, but not magazines, internet web pages.
00:37:46
Speaker
And then at the same time, they're also the ones who are on the other side of it, vending the positive search results for advertisers. And so they're catching them both coming and going and enjoying a huge portion of the revenue there where
00:38:01
Speaker
in the Google Ads Advertiser ad network. They enjoy something like 80% market share. And this is all, we'll post the Ars Technica article in the show notes here. And there's a great diagram that shows this. It's the DOJ's diagram that interestingly is done in the material design of Google. So I think they're trolling Google a little bit with this chart. And then all that kind of comes together in the ad exchange.
00:38:31
Speaker
and is just a huge portion of the market where they don't own literally the entire market on the internet, but it is a prohibitively large portion of it that basically, if Google wants to pull a lever and radically change the internet advertising economy, like they have the power to do it, they can.
00:38:55
Speaker
This for my, do you, did you guys hear about the Amazon smile story about how they shut down Amazon smile and in response to all these stories came out about like, Oh, the whole reason Amazon smile, which was the like alt website where 1% or something of your purchase prices would go to charity. Uh, the whole reason that existed in the first place was so that they didn't have to pay Google for the clicks from the, Oh, I just activated my, my.
00:39:24
Speaker
Okay, my thing. So they didn't have to pay Google for the clicks. Yeah, by the way, they're listening to everything we say right now. I have Google devices all over my house. I have a Google doorbell. I have a Google security. Yeah. So if anything happens to me, just know
00:39:45
Speaker
Just know who it was. You know who it was. It was Apple. I love Google. I love Google. Don't go after my precious Google.
00:39:58
Speaker
Right. So yeah. So the smile thing, my understanding behind that was that it was encouraging people to go directly to not search for an item plus the keyword Amazon. Right. But instead to go directly through the Amazon and to not have to. I gotcha. Okay. It is crazy. I always wondered why it was so annoying to get to Amazon smile. And it turned out it was because they had to make it annoying. Otherwise, there was no point to it.
00:40:24
Speaker
I always thought it was just to sort of make it more like they didn't particularly want to do it. Like it was something they were offering because they wanted to get the good publicity, but they didn't actually want to be giving one percent of prices. So, you know, make it a pain. But so, yeah, so the whole reason for it is sort of a strange turn of events that you have these huge companies like Google and Facebook. I'm sorry, an Amazon and necessarily
00:40:50
Speaker
at the bottom of it all, they're handing money back and forth to each other through all these little things. You look at this whole ad network, and presumably, other fang, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, what is it, Netflix, and then Google, are customers of all of these exchanges. I'm sorry, of the exchange and their publishers and their advertisers, and they're using all of this too. And it does sort of
00:41:13
Speaker
I imagine you don't make a lot of friends in Silicon Valley that way, if you're Google. And so there's not going to be a lot of people rushing to their defense on this. Like, I don't think Facebook or I'm sorry, Meta is going to see this and think, well, that could be up next. So, you know, we should stand shoulder to shoulder here. What is friendship, though? I wish I had like a binding case law on what friendship was. That'd be nice.
00:41:37
Speaker
You know, I'm not so sure that Facebook won't intervene in this situation or at least like, you know, I mean, chime in with amicus briefs or something like that because Facebook, while they may not be super chummy with Google,
00:41:54
Speaker
I haven't heard a lot about hostility between the two companies, not the same way that you hear about hostility between like Facebook and Apple because Facebook meta is ticked off that Apple is undermining Facebook's business with the way that they're doing, you know, like the app tracking transparency and stuff like that. You don't hear about that same sort of hostility between Google and Facebook and Google is what meta
00:42:24
Speaker
kind of part of what Meta aspires to be. And so it's probably in Meta's interest a little bit to stand up and say, well, hey, you guys are having this conversation about antitrust in online advertising. We've got a little bit of a stake in this and our stake is much more aligned with Google than it is with, I guess if we're doing alphabet, it's much more aligned with alphabet.
00:42:49
Speaker
than it is with the United States government. And so I don't know that they necessarily want to sit back and soak in the schadenfreude of watching Google get punished, knowing that if Google goes down, like, well, you're the next player up and you don't necessarily want the DOJ knocking on your door, at least about this, any more than they're knocking at your door about other stuff.
00:43:15
Speaker
I think Facebook may, Meta may find themselves aligned with Google in this. I don't know if they'll chime in with a lot of gusto though. They'll chime in to say, hey, government go after Apple because Apple ruined our whole business model.
00:43:29
Speaker
by giving everybody privacy. That's Facebook. So Jason, you started this by saying, though, how does this actually work? And I don't I don't know either. I don't know if either of you guys have any real understate my sort of gut. Again, I'm not an antitrust attorney as legal advice. I don't know what I'm talking about. My thought is if they divide website publishers from the ad exchange and from the advertisers
00:43:52
Speaker
Are they then injecting antitrust restrictions in the interplay between those separate entities? Because obviously, if you just force them to technically be under different entities, under different roofs, all part of Alphabet, but separate companies, or even not part of Alphabet, but functionally the same company they were, because a huge company like Google, it's a million little companies anyway in terms of how it's actually operating day to day. So if you formally require them to break up in this way,
00:44:22
Speaker
in a way that is different from Bell, Bell Telephone, I don't exactly understand how, how do you then compel the ad exchange and the advertisers or the ad exchange and the website publishers that were former segments of the same company that are now technically separate companies? How do you prevent them from just behaving the same exact way they did a moment ago? You know, I think I, I wonder whether or not these companies look, they, they get along in that they're, you know,
00:44:50
Speaker
working in tandem. But just like when you have a bunch of companies under one roof, they're feuding and having different objectives. And they will get into battles with upper management with each other.
00:45:03
Speaker
like they want to you know so um that's my point for example twitch twitch is in a battle or not i don't know whether there's an actual battle but you know twitch maybe doesn't have the same incentive to negotiate against an Amazon web services which provides its own it's uh
00:45:23
Speaker
it's web hosting because it's owned by Amazon. So the incentives to negotiate a good rate from Amazon for its cloud services isn't there. And it's totally different. Once you're a separate company with separate shareholders, separate dividends, you're going to actually negotiate with each other. Theoretically, at least you're supposed to. Of course, that's all
00:45:49
Speaker
If they actually are all kumbaya and see a positive community value, community being the community of websites, they're community companies that has a hold in this advertising market. Maybe they keep working in tandem. No actual agreement because that would be illegal. But they just work as one and in sync.
00:46:15
Speaker
to see that benefit, but it's very light. It's very possible that they actually are rivals, or at least have different objectives. So with the breakup of the bells, that was something that could happen on geographic lines. And the last major antitrust that really sticks in my mind, especially in the tech field, was Microsoft. And that was basically don't
00:46:44
Speaker
you know, steer everybody into the bundled in Internet Explorer, you got to leave space for, you know, these other competitors in the browser market. But I don't understand how you would really there's no geographic line to draw here.
00:47:02
Speaker
And I don't know if there's a technological line to draw here other than like maybe we take the seller side and we split that off into one company. We take the buyer side and we split that off into another company and then maybe we have like an intermediary broker between the buy side and the sell side and we break that up into a different company.
00:47:25
Speaker
But I don't necessarily understand how you make that situation work either. Right. Where are you getting that interview company? Like you're just spinning that up. I don't think you can like, yeah, like creating a whole other entity just seems like such. I mean, that would be, that's so complicated. It's hard for me to imagine a court ordering that, you know, there'd be so many second questions, third questions, 10th questions.
00:47:51
Speaker
Well, and then you bump into a situation of, okay, we spin off these companies into two separate companies. Let's say we just do two companies. We've got the sell side with the publishing side, and we've got the ad purchasing side. We spin those off into two companies.
00:48:07
Speaker
Aside from court orders that thou shalt not branch into seller side, publisher side, you never branch into the advertiser side. Advertiser side, you never branch into publisher side.
00:48:22
Speaker
Okay, but aren't there natural synergies between those two things where you would want to be playing on both the publishing side and the purchasing side? It just seems like such a natural market efficiency that Google probably developed its
00:48:41
Speaker
iron grip on this market by being the first, and maybe not the first, but like the first big one. Like it was in the beginning, it was Google and AltaVista and Ask Jeeves and whatever else was out there. And it kind of just, and Yahoo, how did I forget Yahoo, man? And Google just kind of stood above the crowd and like,
00:49:09
Speaker
How do you, how do you walk that back? How do you prevent it from happening again? Is this just a temporary measure and we got to go back and correct it every 10 or 15 years? I don't know. But luckily, hopefully there's some smart people at the DOJ working on that. One of the chief complaints that the DOJ had was that Google had bought all the companies that were first. And that was kind of the anti-competitive thing. So, you know, maybe, maybe you,
00:49:35
Speaker
have an order prohibiting somebody from acquiring the companies, but I'm not sure that does very much.
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, because certainly on the publishing side with DoubleClick having 90% market share, it seems like the acquisition of DoubleClick and the growth under Google is really what has brought them to here. If you carve off DoubleClick, I don't think there's no problem. They're not having this discussion. So if you segment this in such a way where DoubleClick is left whole, I think to your point, they'll just recreate what they did.
00:50:11
Speaker
branch to the advertising side, and they'll rehire all the people that were in the carved off company. And that's it, you'll be right back there. And I don't know if we have the the other thing about the geographical aspect of the Bell telephone breakup is there is like a sort of permanence to that it requires that regional telecoms have to now compete with a regional telecom, not with one wing of a massive telecom.
00:50:33
Speaker
And so you can have room for competition. But here, without those geographical limitations, you can just immediately grow right back. It'd be as though one of those little bell telephones just was able to immediately go back international again and subsume all the others and get right back to where they were with a different name.
00:50:52
Speaker
No, that took like 15 years or something before that happened, right? Cause they, all the baby bells ultimately became AT&T, right? They ultimately all came back together. Or was Verizon one of the baby bells maybe? I don't, I knew this at one point. Uh, but yeah, I mean, they all ultimately came back together or AT&T national ended up forming again with a bunch of baby bells.
00:51:23
Speaker
But with much more competition, it'd be hard to say that there isn't telecom competition at this point, especially when you consider that going to be back off of the networks. Yeah, but you wonder if that's owing to that breakup or just technology developing. That would have happened anyway. And this was a massive inefficiency for STEL telephone.
00:51:46
Speaker
I think maybe the solution to this problem here is to radically strengthen the FTC, which by the way, I'm in favor of to begin with because I like what the FTC is doing about non-competes.
00:52:02
Speaker
Even though it's going to cost me a lot of business to not be able to litigate non-competes anymore, I like what they're doing there. Maybe we just need a much more robust FTC reviewing and approving these mergers or not approving them because we've been in an acquisition phase in tech and a bunch of other industries
00:52:22
Speaker
Banks, we've been in an acquisition phase for an awfully long time and that acquisition phase is resulting in a lot of big monolithic organizations that have a lot of power over consumers, a lot of power over the government and influence on policy. I'm here, I'm putting my flag in the ground here on, let's bolster the FTC. Not going to be a popular opinion.
00:52:52
Speaker
It's popular here. I'm with you. I have no opinion on the administrative state. What about the internet in terms of making the internet worse and how double click has done unquestionably done that? How about AI writing on the internet? Do you have an opinion on that?
00:53:11
Speaker
Oh, AI writing seems like it could be. Yeah, I did see
AI in Media and Content Creation
00:53:18
Speaker
that. So CNET is pausing its AI writing. And by the way, I know much. I know too much about the corp what happened corporate wise at CNET the last few years because they were connected to some of my favorite websites when they were sold by CBS and bought by Red Ventures, which is like a like a
00:53:38
Speaker
Yeah, which is a giant like VC backed media company, North Carolina. But yeah, so they're pausing. They've announced they're pausing their writing. We talked about this a week or two ago where they were they were publishing things under CNET staff name when if you click through, turned out it was A.I. supported and turned out it was occasionally wrong.
00:54:06
Speaker
And they're pausing that because of all the blowback from their employees and the public. And I'm waiting for the blowback from Google because Google said they, you know, deprioritize AI search results. But apparently that's not dissuading BuzzFeed.
00:54:22
Speaker
who has maybe the most AI writeable content when it comes to like quizzes and listicles. Just like the easiest things that you could reproduce and would be better to have for a or like would seems like it would be very effective to have for AI because you just need a ton of them and they don't seem like they're different. They say that they're going to start using it about in a very cagey way about how much they're actually going to do it.
00:54:52
Speaker
And in addition to being just like Taylor made for Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed is not even remotely concerned with the accuracy of what they put up. And so that makes AI and chat GPT just like, okay, perfect. Totally on par. This came up separately in our discussion. Uh, but like, uh, somebody was using chat GPT. I think I saw this on Mastodon. Uh, somebody was using chat GPT, like tell me three interesting cases about what was it about?
00:55:18
Speaker
Christmas time or something like that or about the holiday season or something. And chat GPT very confidently gave three interesting cases, one from Washington, one from New York, one from Oregon. I'm sure I got the details of it wrong. And none of those cases actually existed. So like BuzzFeed, great. Like go for it. This is right on par for what you're looking for.
00:55:41
Speaker
Yeah, that all three of those cases had holdings where I was like, that seems wrong. Where like, it was like dropping an egg from the roof is protected First Amendment expression. And it's just like, wait, what? Like, I, okay, there's like, I started going through as the O'Brien factors of when it's, you know, expressive conduct, but not speech. And like, oh, wait, dropping an egg seems pretty dangerous. For like, if you're dropping it on people,
00:56:09
Speaker
uh and yeah and and also i i was like this seems like not correct under first amendment there was the one from new york which i don't remember what it was but it was it was all plausible and that's kind of the thing it's so good at making plausible
00:56:24
Speaker
plausible writing and it doesn't care whether or not it's accurate is the problem. I think maybe we're under crediting chat GPT as like having good lawyer credentials because it has an astonishingly great ability to be confidently incorrect. That's like two thirds of the qualifications for being a lawyer.
00:56:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, it could definitely like get by practicing. I feel like, like it couldn't pass the bar, but once it passes the bar and nobody would know. I don't think people would know. They'd just be like, wow, that lawyer's crazy. That lawyer, wait, that lawyer sounds confident, but he, she doesn't actually know what they're talking about.
00:57:09
Speaker
It's going to be a really quirky member of the bar that shows up at the lunches, like kind of extra sweaty and gives a talk about the Second Amendment or something. Always wearing their earbuds for some reason. I don't know what's going on with that. Kind of has a metallic sheen. I went minorly viral this week on esq.social, our Mastodon instance, because I was messing around with chat GPT and I was trying to tell it
00:57:34
Speaker
Um, what has gone on with Twitter in the last, you know, whatever it's been six months, whatever. And so I, I just basically, like, I don't, I didn't editorialize. I did a little, okay. I editorialized a little bit, but for the most part, I just basically said what was going on. You know, people have been unbanned. A lot of people are unhappy. Elon Musk has purchased it, et cetera. And it just flat out argues with me. It just tells me that's incorrect.
00:57:55
Speaker
and then gives me like a fake news argument like you know you really should be more careful where you find your news it's not plausible that Elon Musk would ever purchase Twitter and if he did and you know he would Twitter doesn't unban people that have been banned for you know racist or homophobic statement whatever that some little you know spiel it gave me but it's very confidently argued with me despite my like
00:58:19
Speaker
starting it by saying this has happened in the last little while. I understand that chat GPT has only has information now up to, I think, 2021 in some for some realms, but mostly 2019. But yeah, it's an excellent lawyer. It will argue with you about something that you know for a fact and you know they don't know. I think it could pass that whatever the Turing test would be for that would pass it well. But also on the on the BuzzFeed thing, we talked about this a little bit before we were on here.
00:58:49
Speaker
So the copyright office has already said that AI generated content can't be copywritten because it's not been touched by, you know, some term of art like hasn't been touched by human hands, right? Hasn't been a human effort or something. Um, I don't really understand what Buzzfeed's plan is. I mean, I guess I do. The plan is to say that, well, this isn't AI generated content. It's just AI assisted. And so I can still, they can still
00:59:15
Speaker
Because I assume they don't particularly want all their content copied on every blog spot blog that wants to get some some clicks, right? So what's the other side here? Like there's they just churn out such a quantity that, you know, no person with a blog spot or a digital ocean WordPress thing can can really replicate it. Or I guess they could try, but.
00:59:40
Speaker
But why would anybody go there instead of Buzzfeed? But also, I don't think they're worried about the copyright. I do think they're going to have a copyright thing. What are you going to say, Jason? So maybe Buzzfeed is just doing what Walmart does with all these like old timey brands that it acquires where like Walmart buys, gosh, what's the one that I'm thinking of? Is it Columbia? Is that a brand that Walmart bought or no, Coleman? Sounds right. I think they bought Coleman.
01:00:07
Speaker
I think that bought the Coleman brand and like Coleman is a brand that had just built up enormous cache over the years as being like, okay, this is decent camping gear. This is decent like cold weather gear. If you buy a Coleman sleeping bag, you know, it's not, you know, North Face or something like that, but it's pretty good. And then they just take it and they
01:00:26
Speaker
trade on the quality of the name, the reputation of the name, maybe that's what Buzzfeed, while drastically reducing the quality of the product and the cost of the product. Maybe that's what Buzzfeed is doing. You know what? We built a lot of cash in here having high quality listicles.
01:00:42
Speaker
you know viral celebrity photos and stuff like that and like okay well we built up this cache now it's time to take it and reduce the quality of the product by using you know ai to generate procedural stuff maybe that's what they're doing with it i wouldn't count on it but that's a that's also a quick way to devalue your brand i i do think that they're gonna they're gonna find a way to keep the copyright though because
01:01:10
Speaker
Uh, you know, they said that, they said that AI produced, that is they being the copyright office said AI produce works for not copyrightable because I guess a person, a person needs to create it for it to be copyrighted. But they're going to change enough. Uh, I know that there's, it just seems wrong that you should be able to create an AI work or you should just click generate on an AI and then change a word and make it copyrightable.
01:01:37
Speaker
I bet we're going to turn to our old friend, our old standbys, substantial and reasonable, and just lean on those really hard for whether or not it's going to be copyrightable about whether it was substantially created by a human or reasonably modified, something along those lines. Because we do use AI, big scare quotes in my hands right now, AI to auto-complete some things.
01:02:06
Speaker
in Word and Outlook, Gmail, iPhones, they all have autocomplete. And I don't think that affects the copyright. Or you can, I mean, Outlook will practically write the whole end of an email for me. I don't have to write, let me know if you have any questions almost. That just
01:02:28
Speaker
auto gets added onto the end of my email. And I think that most people would agree that it's still cut. Well, I don't care whether my email is copyrighted. But like, if you get an auto completed sentence, which you wrote, but the last four words or something are auto completed, that's fine. And so obviously, there's some kind of middle ground there. Huge gap between that and chat GPT write me a song about
01:02:56
Speaker
about the guitar that's behind Jason right now. And then it's spitting out five paragraphs that's different. But it's going to be left to the courts, I bet. And it's going to be a mess, as it usually is.
01:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, because administratively, I also wonder how exactly that would work, because why would you ever... So let's assume that these AIs eventually have models that you can run locally. So you're a publishing house that turns out relatively like low quality books, let's say, right? Let's say children. No, I'm just kidding. Children's books aren't low quality. But okay, low quality books, right? Cheap novels. And so you have an AI that is generating these books, right?
01:03:39
Speaker
Why would you ever say to the Copyright Office this was generated by AI? Why wouldn't you just always say that it was corrected? How would they ever find out? And to leave it to the courts, the two decisions that apparently the Copyright Office had leaned on
01:03:55
Speaker
lower court rulings as to what would not be copyrightable because it didn't have sufficient human intervention. One was a 97 decision that found a book of divine revelations lacked the human element of human arrangement and curation to be protected. And the other was that monkey photograph that the monkey couldn't hold the copyright for the photograph it took itself.
01:04:17
Speaker
So it's definitely is like the reasonable and the substantial and something like that. But again, the other part is I just don't see how it administratively works. Why would you tell the copyright office that you never generated by AI? You just say AI assisted over and over. And you don't even like they and also you don't need to read. You don't need to like send something to the copyright office for it to be copyrighted, right?
01:04:38
Speaker
I don't think so. How does that even work? I don't know. I was told that once you put something online, it's protected. That's my understanding. Once you create it, it's protected supposedly. I think you can register works, but I don't know what purpose that serves exactly other than maybe like a who to contact type.
01:04:58
Speaker
But yeah, I don't think you need to. And I know the urban legend of having to mail it to yourself is just, I guess, to see if people will do that. You've heard that, right? Yeah. In order to have something copy written, you should print it out and put it in envelope and mail it to yourself. I thought that was for to prove when you did it so that you'd have the postmark. And so you never... Is that what it is? I thought that's what it was.
01:05:21
Speaker
But then that's just for the envelope. Couldn't I say, well, yeah, I wrote this prediction as to what's going to happen in 2023 when this postmark happened. You don't open it was what I heard. You keep it sealed.
01:05:37
Speaker
It's putting a lot of weight on envelope being. Yeah, we had to. We had to work with what we could in the 90s. OK, you you don't know what it was. I'm talking to somebody who has mailed something to the copyright, aren't I? What was it a song?
01:05:55
Speaker
You're the youth correspondent. Yeah. When I wrote my Guitar Hero Guide for Game Facts and put it online, I put a bunch of disclaimers on the bottom about how I own the copyright and nobody's allowed to copy it. And wouldn't you know it, many, many people copied it.
01:06:13
Speaker
Is this really true? Did you actually write a game pack for guitar hero? Yes, I did. Oh man. This is a great layer of the onion to peel back, Jake. I'm going to go dig this up right now. Yeah. I like, I told my teacher about this and she's like, Oh, you wrote a thing. And then she looked at it and she's like, Oh my God, this is so involved. I was like, yeah, I spent a lot of time on this. Uh, how old are you? What, what sort of teacher are we talking about here? I was like 15. It was high school. I think 16 whenever game guitar hero came out.
01:06:44
Speaker
Oh yeah, I found it. Yeah, it's not hard to find. No, it's not. I think it might, maybe not yet. Maybe that'll be a special gated content for episode 100 or something like that. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard to find like, don't even try guys. Like, yeah.
01:07:07
Speaker
Jason's reading. I can see his eyes reading it right now. Oh, I'm totally reading it right now. I have a lot of questions, Jake, but we're going to do most of these offline. OK. Yeah. OK, so if we don't have anything else to talk about in terms of AI flooding the internet with terrible writing, which I don't think is necessarily, by the way, just one last comment. I don't think it's going to be any worse than the terrible writers that I have written. I can talk about people who write for content farms. I think I've talked about it on this podcast in the past in college. You did it.
01:07:37
Speaker
Yeah, for like $25, you know, an article or whatever. They're terrible writers. It's that content is awful. The recipes are terrible. The ideas are terrible. It's all terrible. So I don't think that chat GPT is going to do that much worse of a job with any of that. I look better. Yeah, exactly. Well, at least it might. I mean, they're Google now. I hate what Google serves me now when I have a question.
01:08:02
Speaker
Uh, or when I want content like it, they figured out Google's algorithm with bad content and Google can't fight back seemingly. And I, it's so annoying. Uh, Google is not what it used to be. So I'm, I'm not sure how much that affects me now.
01:08:19
Speaker
Well, maybe you'll be using Bing soon because this isn't one of our topics, but Microsoft committed to putting more money into open AI and they're getting even more in bed with GPT-3 and all the underlying code behind chat GPT. And this is the first time I've heard of some sort of plan that a search company other than Google has that I actually think might challenge Google. Like this could be really, I mean,
01:08:46
Speaker
It just sort of eliminating search results that are links to web pages and instead having the first result be like an answer to your question itself generated answer right there that could be huge.
01:08:59
Speaker
only if it's accurate, only if it actually starts caring about being accurate. If it starts being the engine where you get plausible wrong answers, that's not going to replace Google for me. Yeah, that could be a problem. That is a way worse situation than getting annoying right answers.
01:09:19
Speaker
Google already serves me have a bunch of confidently incorrect answers from Quora all the time. Q-U-O-R-A. If you want to validate that an answer is incorrect, what's that principle where the fastest way to find the correct way to do something is to post the incorrect way online? That's Quora to me.
01:09:46
Speaker
Quora also, for some reason, if you visit their website and you're logged in, they will forever send you emails. I think at some point I signed up through, this is not interesting, podcasting, but at some point I signed up through Google or something to Quora to, I don't know if I asked a question or I just viewed a question, but you get on some sort of mailing list and there's no getting off of that. You just continually get, the same way Amazon will send you other lamps that you might be interested in because you once bought a lamp, it does the same thing with related questions you might be interested in.
01:10:14
Speaker
As though, yeah, I have thousands of faucets that are leaking and this, oh my goodness, I can't believe you found the exact right one and sent me this answer. Do you have unread notifications on Nextdoor? Because I do. I've had 20 plus unread. I get emails about my unread notifications on Nextdoor all the time. Whenever the unsubscribe is like change your mail preferences and it's like a big menu.
01:10:40
Speaker
It's they know what they're doing. They're making it really annoying to unsubscribe. Uh, yeah, next door. I'm never going to check those just this week. I have unsubscribed from next door like four times and it still keeps coming. It still keeps going.
Community Quirks and Entertainment Recommendations
01:10:56
Speaker
This is unrelated, this is related, but this isn't on topic with what we usually talk about. But do you guys have people in your area on Nextdoor that ask about every cat they see outside if this is someone's baby as though they've never understood the concept of stray cats or neighborhood cats? I have dozens, if not hundreds of alerts for this little gray one. Is this anyone's baby? They're stray cats? Where are you from? They've never seen a stray cat before. It's not somebody's monkey. That's a city.
01:11:26
Speaker
That, that, that's a city perspective. If there's a cat around here, it's not a stray cat. I'm in, I'm in the middle of like this. Yeah. No, there are no stray cats, no stray dogs in my area. As far as I know, I've never seen a straight dog live in post-apocalyptic wasteland. There's not bands of dogs running around. You do have like wolves that are like trying to hunt you down though. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:11:53
Speaker
Yeah. Like you almost got murdered by some coyotes. So that kind of counts. Yeah. Yeah. The stray cats don't survive long around here. They get gobbled up by coyotes pretty quickly, I think. So that probably, I do get people posting on next door about every single, uh, uh, scare quotes here, suspicious looking car that's been driving through the neighborhood.
01:12:14
Speaker
And it's never people who actually live in my subdivision. It's people who live kind of somewhat close to my subdivision, but not actually in here, but a mile and a half away. Why are you lumped in? You don't live here. Next door. Two thumbs down. Zero of 10 stars. Do not recommend.
01:12:33
Speaker
That's why I don't have stray cats. We have bears here. I might've mentioned that before. My area is full of bears. Bears all over the place. In Florida? In Florida? There are so many bears in Florida. It's a thing. Every four years or something, there's a bear hunt because we have too many bears, so the goal is to kill as many bears as possible. Anyway, very controversial every time.
01:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, same thing here. We have the same problem here because the population went to nothing and then they protected them. And then we had a pair. This is a sad story, but we had a bear a couple of years ago that was a like a celebrity bear. He was called Petals. Do you remember that? It was like national news because he ran around on his hind legs and then some guy. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And like God and like said he did it like it posted on Facebook. I got him or whatever during the bear hunt and then had to go because people were like hunting for him now.
01:13:30
Speaker
This is like Kyle Bartman of the Philadelphia area. You catch what you thought was a foul ball and our pariah comes down. Why do you guys look so angry? All right, fellas, let's wrap it up with some recommendations here. Mr. Schumer, what do you have for us by the way of recommendations?
01:13:58
Speaker
Did you guys watch Adult Swim? Are you too old for Adult Swim?
01:14:05
Speaker
No. Wow. Thanks for that one, Jake. I'm like four years older than you. Shut up. But yeah, what's the aqua teen hunger force and stuff like that? Like, yeah, I know the adult swim. OK, so I was into the adult swim a long time ago. And then it was like, OK, this humor isn't for me now. I'm a grown man. This isn't for me. But there is a Twitch streamer that I watch.
01:14:33
Speaker
who like perfectly encapsulates that feeling. And I still enjoy it because it's live. It's like a live Tim and Eric aquatine kind of thing. He's called the windbag. And if you have any interest in watching and getting into like a Adult Swim vibe with a few hundred other people,
01:14:54
Speaker
listening to this guy make up random stories about chicken pigs and sing songs to pretty good beats, The Windbag on Twitch.
01:15:06
Speaker
All right. We'll have to get back to that. What's the movie rating level of the content here? Is it PG? Is it PG-13? Is it rated R? He'll occasionally swear, but not as a rule. But that's all. Mostly it's just- So we're talking like PG-13. PG-13 maybe. PG, PG-13. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's more just like completely nonsense. Okay. So kids wouldn't like that.
01:15:35
Speaker
So for my recommendation, this is Jason, because people might not know our voices yet. We have, as a family, been watching the Disney Plus show, The Mysterious Benedict Society, which I think we're probably a little bit behind the time on this. But it's Tony Hale of Buster Bluth fame from Arrested Development, a cast of kids. There's a guy on there who was
01:16:03
Speaker
one of the guys from Remember the Titans, the one who ended up, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen Remember the Titans, even though it's been out for 20 years, the guy who gets in the car wreck and like really badly hurt. He's on there too. But it's like this really goofy, quirky, I don't know how to describe it other than like,
01:16:28
Speaker
You know, the vibe that you kind of got from the really weird movie is like the Royal Tenenbaums where everybody's sort of aloof and unaware and just super quirky. It's like that, but distilled down to a kid's mystery show. And we've been watching that with our kids for the last, I don't know, week and a half or so. Really cool. A neat little show. We're maybe six or seven episodes into it. I feel strongly enough about it that I could give it a good recommendation. What was the name again?
01:16:58
Speaker
the mysterious Benedict Society. Okay. And that's on Disney Plus, right?
01:17:04
Speaker
Disney Plus, you got it. Very cool. My recommendation for this week is a little self-centered. We've talked about, we're all on esq.social, the Mastodon instance. And we've talked about, I think in episode one, we talked about what the Fetaverse is sort of broadly, and it's just a bunch of different applications all operating on a similar protocol. And so in addition to Mastodon, there's many others, but there's another one that's called Lemmy, which is sort of a Fetaverse version of Reddit.
01:17:30
Speaker
And so I just quickly installed an instance on links.esq.social that's for sharing links, just like a subreddit would be for lawyers, attorneys, legally adjacent professionals. And so that's my recommendation. If you guys want to give it a shot, go on there, see if there's anything interesting that you might want to read or comment on and sign up for an account. I have a
01:17:53
Speaker
It's just a wait list. It's not really a wait list. It's just to make sure that there's not bots or whatever joining. But I'm pretty responsive, so I will add you pretty quickly when I see you've applied and see if you like it. If you don't, you don't have to hang out. I have a random question about that. Is ActivityPub the protocol that allows all the Fediverse applications to speak to each other? Does it let me work with ActivityPub?
01:18:20
Speaker
It does. Yeah, you can follow it from a mastodon instance and presumably vice versa. But it wouldn't really make a lot of sense to do it the other way. But yeah, there's actually there's plugins that can turn your WordPress blog into an activity pub sort of publishing engine as well. And so then it can be followed just as a, you know,
01:18:38
Speaker
It, you know, what we were really just doing is it's cutting out the middleman for, for what used to be like RSS feed to Twitter bots. Yeah, exactly. It's just cutting that out. I was going to say, we're all just trying to get back to the RSS feed magic age. We all just are trying to redo the RSS feed. Yep.
01:18:58
Speaker
That's it for us. RSS feeds, they never died. They they've been there the whole time. Just low key, uh, being the foundation of the information web. Long live RSS. Google reader might be gone, but RSS lives on. Yeah. Viva la RSS. All right, fellas. Pleasure. Pleasure as always. See you next week. I think so. See you next week.